Whether you are applying for faculty positions or for jobs in the broad range of other industries/fields that value a STEM PhD, there is plenty you can and should be doing throughout your PhD to position yourself for success. Attend this session to get advice about what to do in your limited professional and career development time to understand yourself and your career goals, explore your career options, and to develop an effective job searching strategy.

Graphene based heterostructures have emerged as
a pristine platform for exploring the interplay of symmetry, topology and
non-Abelian excitations in the quantum Hall regime. I will begin with a
theoretical review of the quantum Hall effect in bilayer graphene before
discussing results in collaboration with the Young Lab at UCSB. Using in-situ
control of the density and electro-magnetic fields, they find a rich phase
diagram which features a plateau at half-filling of a Landau level with a gap
several times larger than previously observed.

Certain classes of superconformal field theories in six dimensions (6D SCFTs) are in one-to-one correspondence with certain classes of group homomorphisms. In this talk, we will see that this correspondence allows us to classify homomorphisms that were previously unknown in the mathematics literature and understand aspects of 6D SCFTs that were previously unknown in the physics literature. We speculate on the implications for the future study of 6D SCFTs and these group homomorphisms.

We study mechanically stable packings of
deformable and rigid 2D circulo-polygons using computer simulations. A 2D circulo-polygon is a particle shape formed by the collection of all points equidistant from the edge of a polygon. It is a generalization of the 2D circulo-cylinder and a circle, which are the collections of all points equidistance from a line and a point, respectively. In our model, the circulo-polygon can be deformable, where the only constraint on the particle is that shape factor, the ratio of the area of the polygon to the square of the perimeter, is fixed.

Surveys of galaxy clusters provide a sensitive probe of cosmology by measuring the evolution of the halo mass function. However, already current cluster surveys are systematically limited by uncertainties in the relation between cluster mass and observables (e.g. X-ray luminosity, cluster richness, SZ decrement). Cluster weak lensing is the most promising observational method to calibrate the mass scaling to the needed precision but requires the control of systematic errors to a few percent each.

Local energy conditions are the key hypothesis in many classical results in general relativity. In quantum theory, these local energy conditions are invalidated due to quantum fluctuations. Nevertheless a weaker condition, the so-called average null energy condition still holds in quantum field theory. I will explain how this condition constrains the data of conformal field theories such as operator product coefficients and scaling dimensions.

In
the next year, the Singh Nanotechnology Center will install two new scanning
transmission electron microscopes that will bring Penn’s capabilities in atomic
scale materials characterization to a world leading level. In this
seminar, I will describe these capabilities using examples from my own
research, from the literature and I will include the latest available results
from the instrument manufacturers. This seminar will be deliberately
forward looking and is intended to inform the Penn Condensed Matter community
of the full scope of capabilities so that they may pla

Coalescent
hidden Markov models (HMM) such as the pairwise sequentially Markovian
coalescent (PSMC, Li and Durbin, 2010) enable estimating the locus-specific
posterior distribution of the time to most recent common ancestor (TMRCA) of a
pair of haploid chromosomes when high-coverage sequencing data is available. I
will present the “ascertained sequentially Markovian coalescent” (ASMC), a
coalescent HMM that can be used to accurately estimate locus-specific TMRCA probabilities
in widely available SNP array data.